


Daylight's a Lifetime Away

by NoelleAngelFyre



Category: The Boy (2016 Bell)
Genre: AU ending, Abusive/Violent Relationships, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Physical Trauma/Deformities, Psychological Trauma, Semi-descriptive discussion of abortion, Two broken people and this broken thing called love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-15
Updated: 2017-07-15
Packaged: 2018-12-02 16:10:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 923
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11512851
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NoelleAngelFyre/pseuds/NoelleAngelFyre
Summary: "Am I a good man, Greta?"





	Daylight's a Lifetime Away

**Author's Note:**

> Another AU ending; this one taking place towards the end, after a living room wall explodes and someone ends up dead.
> 
> Note: Title taken from lyrics of "Fallen Star" by Kamelot.
> 
> Disclaimer: No characters, events, or circumstances associated with "The Boy" belong to me, and I'm writing none of this for profit. Just for fun. Also, this is not a healthy relationship. Please do not try at home.

He comes to her: porcelain-white forms streaked liberally with the rust-red of blood cool and drying. Phantom apparition, avenging angel, erupting through walls and mirrors; descending from above or ascending from Hell below, she cannot be sure. His are the hands responsible for driving violence into a one man’s throat and cutting out another’s conscious awareness with barely an effort. Yet these are the hands which now lift to her face, to her hair, and touch with absolute tenderness.

(These weeks past, she has cradled and tended to a doll bearing his name and, at one time, a lifetime ago, his flawless face. But it is she, in his eyes, who is made of porcelain: one thoughtless gesture away from shattering entirely.)

“Did he hurt you?”

His voice startles her. A child, faceless presence addressing her through phone lines and behind closed doors, is already becoming a distant memory. This is a voice to befit the man standing before her; swallowing her with shadow alone. The tone is deep, but harsh. Rasped. Rough. He does not possess his parents’ cultured accent.

(She blinks. Stares a little closer at what is permitted visible beyond an ill-fitting mask’s borders. In the struggle, the moments before he drove a broken shard into Cole’s neck and ended her nightmare of too many months, the protective veil came askew. Now, looking without much care of whether or not he notices, details sharpen from the blur of shadows and the unkempt black beard crawling outward. She sees the damaged skin: scars raised from foundations; skin sapped of color, ruined and almost beyond recognition as human flesh. It stretches from throat to jaw to what, beneath the mask, must be his mouth.

And she understands why he speaks this way. Why it is easier to whisper as a child.)

“Greta?”

She blinks again. Shakes her head. (But it’s a lie, because Cole did hurt her. Hurt her in the worst possible way a man can hurt the woman he claims to love, just shy of stealing her life. And there were days, so many days in the aftermath, she wished he had done exactly that because death with her unborn baby was better than life with him in it.) There are words, building at the back of her throat, but lips are locked and she has no key.

His hands are large. Large, broad, with long fingers trailing aimlessly and sliding into her hair. He touches as if it is his right to touch.

(She doesn’t stop him.)

Her hand lifts; fingers reaching before they even brush cold porcelain cheeks. She traces shapes carved in place of flesh and bone. Blood smears beneath her touch. Rust-red follows her wandering paths until white is outmatched. She grabs the edge, hard and chilled and damp with sweat, and pulls.

(He doesn’t stop her.)

His face is a ruined canvas; a mockery of what once presented as perfect and whole. She wonders if the fire was simply a catalyst to reveal his true face. If now, as for the last twenty years and twenty-more years still to come, he now has an outside to match his inside.

(She thinks of herself: this pretty little face. Her pretty face which attracts mindless brutes and their fists that hurt and hurt and kill innocence. Her sweet smile cast thoughtlessly towards a perfect stranger who then seeks, shamelessly so, to be far more than a stranger. Her perfect face. Her flawless smile. Fake. It’s all so pathetically fake. Only her eyes have ever seemed honest.

She wonders what she looks like, under her mask. Brahms looks into her eyes, now, with his own cool grey gaze, and there are no barriers shutting him out. She wonders what he sees.)

His hands take her face prisoner between red-streaked palms. He steps closer. Those grey eyes are bright: too bright and too beautiful for a face so hideous. _Eyes are windows to the soul._ How can a monster be of a soul shining so bright? Is she, then, dull and dark? Did the life and light bleed out with her baby, broken and lifeless?

He steps closer still. He smells of sweat, of blood, of musk. Dust and decay clings to his clothes.

(The next steps forward are hers. She doesn’t realize it until the hot bursts of breath on her brow grow impossibly warmer, dust across her hairline, and the musk overwhelms her.)

“You promised to stay.” He says. It’s not a question, but there is the tiniest drop of uncertainty quivering at the tip. “You promised you wouldn’t leave me.”

“I know.”

“They left me.” He continues. His hands are gliding down her shoulders, matching paths over both arms. “They’re not coming back.”

“I know.” She didn’t know, yet thinks she’s known since the beginning.

(Something dries tight and sticky over her cheeks. Cole’s blood. She can feel it along the paths Brahms drew, down her neck. If she wanted to look down, she would see the same over her clothes.)

“Am I a good man, Greta?” His hands are at her waist: keeping her in place, pulling her closer.

“No.”

“Do you love me, Greta?”

_I don’t know you_ , but she thinks she’s known this horrible face and those bright grey eyes all her life. Distantly, never truly meeting except in dreams she can’t remember; behind closed doors and along cracked boundaries of haunted foundations. Now, finally, in the haze of nightmares ending and hopeful dreams crumbling, they meet. They meet, and she knows.

“Yes.”


End file.
